Shockwave, page 15
“They couldn’t convict him; you said that yourself.”
“And Mack said Homer wouldn’t last long in a mental hospital—that’s got to be a dangerous place for a guy like him.”
“But the only way they boot him out of jail is if—”
“That’s why I’m telling you it would take too long, ma chérie. Even with Mack visiting him, Homer’s not going to keep it together where they’ve got him now, not for months and months.”
“But he won’t have to,” my wife said. “The DA will just hold a press conference and say the crazy man who did that terrible thing has been removed from the community. Who’s going to question that?”
“By now, they know this ‘Welter’ guy they found on the beach was an ex-con, with White Power tattoos. Probably a lot of people had a reason to kill him. And it’s not like there’s any outsider looking close. The papers here, they just print whatever that little weasel hands out.”
“That’s what you mean by solving it?”
“Yes. The guy who got killed, he’d only been out of jail for— Damn!” I snarled at myself. “Dolly, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“It’s the middle of the—”
“I’m only going downstairs, honey.”
“Oh.”
|>No longer seeking team. Their mission completed. Target: Welter Thom Jordan, 33, M/W. 2 prison terms, assault, last one “hate crime.” Only questions now: (1) Infiltrated? (2) Info + Traffic Intercept?<|
“See?” I said to Dolly as I got back into bed a few minutes later.
“What’s next, Dell?”
“Depending on what I get—what I find out, I mean—I’ll know how fast we can solve this … or even if it can be solved.”
“And if …?”
“There’s one sure way to prove Homer didn’t kill that guy he found on the beach. Only one sure way to stop the DA from holding that press conference.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, I think you do. You just don’t like it.”
“If you’re saying—”
“Here’s what I’m saying, ma petite. You think Mack’s important to this whole … ‘community’ or whatever you call it, yes?”
“He’s vital.”
“Because of what he does. And who he does it with, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So, if he’s not here, the town deals with all these homeless people different, right? They leave all that to Mack, instead of just rounding them up and shipping them off.”
“There’s plenty that still want to do that. If they can say one of those people Mack was … handling, I guess you’d call it—if they can say one of them turned out to be a killer, a crazy killer, they’d start with them … and I don’t know where they’d stop.”
“And, personally, you consider him un homme d’honneur?”
“Oui.”
“Depending on what I … what I find out, we may have to see if that’s true.”
“You’re my friend,” Mack said to me the next morning. “That’s why you’re with me. Just hanging out.”
“What’s my name?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll see what I mean, soon as Khaki shows up.”
“Khaki?”
“That’s what he calls himself, so that’s what we call him.”
“And you’re sure he’s going to—”
“This is Thursday. Soon as the sun moves a little more west, he’ll be by. This is his route—he’s locked into it.”
I didn’t say anything. Mack didn’t know me well enough to understand that when I don’t have anything to say, I just go quiet. “He’s not dangerous,” he assured me. I got the impression it was something he said a lot. Had to say a lot.
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. I wouldn’t want you to misinterpret—”
“You’re in charge.”
“Sure. Only, I could feel you go into—I don’t know what to call it—some state of calm, like when people meditate. But I know you weren’t doing that.”
“I’m just relaxed.”
“No, you’re not. I’ve never seen you relax. But, like on that freight, you were in a different … mode, is the only word I can think of.”
Dolly said he’d never been a soldier, I thought. Still, he picks up on where I go when I don’t know what’s coming but I know I might have to kill it.
Before I could say anything, Mack’s chin moved up slightly, just enough to tell me he’d spotted the man we were waiting for.
He looked pretty normal to me, except he was a tick off everywhere: wearing what looked like moccasins, blue jeans, a khaki jacket … and some kind of flimsy pink scarf tied around his neck. He walked purposefully, but his hands weren’t in sync with his feet. The right hand especially—it was twitching like an electric current was passing through his arm.
Mack stood up, so I did, too.
“Hey, Khaki,” Mack called out.
The man came right up to us. “Hey, Face,” he said. It took me a second to register that this was his name for Mack.
“This is my—”
“Commanding officer,” he finished the sentence. “I know who Major Hannibal is.”
I started to stick out my hand for him to shake, but his right hand flew into a military salute. What could I do but return it? His eyes were like dots of brown mud. And his right hand had stopped twitching. I snapped my hand down first. Protocol.
Mack sat on the grass, folding himself into a lotus position the crazy guy did his best to imitate. I didn’t know whether to side with him or with Mack, so I acted as if I couldn’t get the position right, either.
To this guy, Mack wasn’t military—or at least not an officer—so no salute for him. I went along with whatever connection the crazy man thought we had between us.
I guess it worked. I could feel him ease into our triangle.
“How’s the new place working out?” Mack asked.
“It’s a lot nicer,” Khaki assured him. “I still hear them, but it’s like they’re … coming from farther away now.”
“Quieter, too?”
“I … guess. It’s hard to tell. I mean, they never shouted, even … before. But they don’t … I mean, they still tell me the same things, but they don’t come in so … frequently, maybe?”
“On their way out, maybe?”
“Maybe … but they still hate me.”
“Is that what they say?”
“Say? Oh … no. No, they don’t have to say it. I mean, when they’re always telling you that you’re so disgusting it would be better if you … You know.”
“But you haven’t even tried, Khaki. Not for a long time now.”
“I’m not gonna, either, Face. What you said, right? If they hate me, why should I do what they want?”
“That’s part of it.”
“I know. There’s the medicine, too. I have to take it to keep them from getting all the way inside my head. I can still hear them, but not from the inside, like before.”
“That’s what not being so close means, Khaki. Didn’t I tell you it would be like that?”
“Yep.”
“And remember, every time they move even a tiny bit more away, the harder it is for them to come back. They’re already outside your head; you can only pick them up with your ears. You keep this up, and someday you won’t be able to hear them at all.”
“I know! It’s like a … I don’t know what to call it. When I first heard the voices, my family didn’t know what to do, but I could see how afraid of me they got. I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them a thousand times—it was in my head. But they didn’t understand. They just sent me to a doctor. I thought that was so I could go back to college, but it was a trick! I ended up in that—”
“You’re not there, anymore,” Mack cut him off. “You’re with me.” Then he took in a deep breath through his nose—I could hear the whistle, but I couldn’t tell if the other guy did—held it for a few seconds, then made a kind of humming sound as he let it come back out.
Khaki immediately did the same thing. Whatever it was, the pressure dial on his speech—the one that I could hear getting close to the redline—moved back down.
“I’m not in any hospital now,” he said, proudly.
“And you’re not going to be again, either,” Mack said, not in a soothing tone, just a man stating a fact. “All we have to do is keep working. Remember—”
“If you’re moving forward, you can’t be moving back.” Khaki stepped in, even prouder than he was before.
Mack extended his fist. Khaki tapped it with his own.
Mack got to his feet. Khaki and I followed.
Mack took a cell phone out of his pocket, held it up.
“I know,” Khaki said, touching the chest of his jacket. He turned to me, said, “Major!” and threw another salute.
I returned it. Then pulled it back and said “Dismissed!,” hitting the second syllable a little harder.
Khaki executed a nice about-face and marched off.
“Face?” I said to Mack.
“From The A-Team.”
I gave him a blank look. I wasn’t faking it.
“It’s a movie. Before that, it was a TV show. ‘Face’ is a part of this team of do-gooder mercenaries. There’s four of them: a lunatic who can fly anything, a black guy who’s seriously strong, a good-looking guy who works all kind of scams. And the man in charge, the Major, his name is ‘Hannibal.’
“Khaki’s been calling me ‘Face’ for a long time. Ever since we got him stabilized. I guess he named you, too.”
“There’s some logic to all that, right? I’m older than you. I’m not black. And I don’t act like a lunatic. So what’s left?”
“You just hit on it,” Mack said, half smiling. “Khaki doesn’t act like a lunatic, either. Not anymore, he doesn’t.”
“So moving those voices farther away, it’s like taking territory?”
“Taking it is one thing,” he said, not smiling anymore. “What Khaki has to learn is how to hold it. He was a junior in the honors program at RPI before his symptoms got too strong to disguise. He’s in his late thirties now. He moved as far away from the voices as he could—his family’s all in New York. His major was engineering, so physical distance made sense to him.”
“But the voices came along.”
“Yeah. When they were inside his head, how could they not? But you know what? At some level, he knew the truth.”
“You lost me.”
“His family has plenty of money. After he was hospitalized over and over without any lasting change—he’d go off his meds pretty quick—they made this deal with him: he’d go away, they didn’t much care where, and they’d pay his rent and whatever else he needed—but he had to stay away.”
“I still don’t get what this ‘truth’ is, the one that he kind of knew about.”
“I spoke with his mother. Just on the phone, but that was enough,” Mack said, back to that flat tone. “I don’t know what they did to him when he was a kid, but I don’t think it was physical. Or sexual. Probably thought they were ‘motivating’ him. You know, ‘to live up to his potential,’ right? But they cut into him—the words cut into him—so deep that they took root. Even when his parents weren’t around, he could always hear the voices. When he started doing bizarre things to make the voices stop, he got his diagnosis.”
“Schizophrenic?” I guessed. Actually, it was the only diagnosis I’d heard for any of Mack’s clients.
“Yeah. And he is. Now and forever. But that doesn’t mean he can’t live a close-to-normal life. He’s smart, and he can learn. He’s already moved a hell of a distance. We just have to be patient.”
“And relentless.”
“That’s my work summed up, right there,” Mack said.
Back in his car, neither of us spoke for a while.
That didn’t make him uncomfortable, like it does most. After a few miles passed, he said: “You know, you said something before that’s been kind of eating at me. Something about how this whole ‘kick out the immigrant invaders’ thing didn’t start here, right? Which means it was going on somewhere else before 9/11. So where was that?”
“You know The Turner Diaries?”
“The red book? Sure. A lot of people consider it the White Power bible. I read it, cover to cover. Starts off with what sounds like a government plot to disarm all citizens—that’d be more than enough to set off the gun people all by itself—you know, that ‘registration is just a cover up for confiscation’ crap. But then it turns into this whole Jewish scheme to kill all white people and turn the country over to blacks. They’re just apes, so the whites who survived, they’d end up in charge.
“That book, it didn’t really get much attention until they found a copy on the guy who blew up that federal building in Oklahoma City.”
“When did it come out? The book, I mean,” I asked him.
“I don’t know—the seventies, sometime in there.”
“Before that, there was this book, Le Camp des saints, over in France. All about how immigrants take over the French Riviera and spread out from there—all the way over here—until they’re ready to rule the world. The American book, it sounds like the same theme, just put in different words.”
“All this to say … what?”
“This is a strange place. When the French book came out, it was translated into English. A lot of … ‘commentators,’ maybe … said it was racist and all that, but worthy of what the French call l’art de la discussion. I don’t read all this ‘critique’ stuff, but I remember hearing people—in France, I’m saying—they thought the book was about how letting immigrants come in was the ticket to Hell.
“Brigitte Bardot was on that team. Les intellectuels had a good laugh at that. Plenty of French people support blocking immigration by anyone, Arabs especially. They even have a whole political party with that for a platform. And all you have to do is look at how quick the French army was dispatched to restore democracy in Mali—they say Al Qaeda overthrew that government—then look at a map and see how Mali borders on Algeria.… You can do the math.”
“You know a lot about France.”
“Not so much,” I said, confident I had given nothing away—it would be no secret to anyone Dolly trusted that she was fluent in French, or that she’d served with Médecins Sans Frontières. He probably assumed that she’d met me someplace in France.
You can’t rely on much from people, but you’ll most likely be on the safe side if you float a vague story out there and let everyone fill in the blanks for themselves.
For the teenage girls who always seemed to be around the house, I was kind of a … presence. If they thought about me at all, it would be to wonder why a woman like Dolly would have involved herself with an older man, and let the rhyme of “France” and “Romance” work itself through their heads.
As for the teenage boys, they were an inevitability Dolly didn’t try to sidestep, but she had rules. Hard, clear rules. If you brought in anything she considered negative—including yourself—you weren’t welcome.
The boys usually decided I’d been some kind of soldier. I didn’t look old enough to be a Vietnam vet, but I had enough miles on my odometer and enough visible scar tissue that they probably thought I’d been there.
Funny thing is that I actually was. Long after America officially left. But the need for reliable info hadn’t gone away just because the uniformed military had.
As we were driving away in that rolling malfunction he called his car, I thought about how Mack had some of the same field skills I did.
Not as fully developed, but I wouldn’t have expected them to be—his training couldn’t have started as early as mine had.
I remember as if it was yesterday. I’d stepped up to an indifferent man sitting behind a battered wooden desk, politely waited for him to take another drag of his cigarette, and then said, “Is this where I can join?”
He raised droopy eyelids, said, “Ton âge?” When I gave him a blank look, he said, “Dix-huit?,” making it clear what response he expected. When I nodded, he was all finished with the interview, exactly as Luc had predicted.
Without looking up, the man pulled a bound sheaf of papers from a drawer and tossed them over to me. “Tu signes là où y a les flèches rouges,” pointing at the various red arrows and making the gesture for “writing” as he did. After all, I didn’t speak French—certainly not native French—and he wasn’t about to defer to my ignorance.
Thanks to the training I was put through soon after that, I could stay in the same position for many hours, not even my body-smell conflicting with my surroundings. Always waiting, but not always for the same reason. Maybe to satisfy myself it was safe to move. Maybe for the enemy to saunter past, never knowing I was waiting for them, my jungle-length bullpup set to “spray.”
And, sometimes, just waiting for my next move to reveal itself to me. Timing was everything—leaving the spot I’d found too soon could be fatal, and leaving too late certainly would be.
For less than a second, I wondered if many other social workers were like Mack. But I already knew the answer: If a soldier couldn’t learn those skills, he stopped being a soldier pretty quick. Stopped being, period. But if a social worker couldn’t learn them, how would anyone tell? If they never left their offices, how much danger could they ever be facing? And, considering who they worked with, who would give a damn, anyway?
We were on the road, because I’d finally convinced Dolly that all the alternatives were ruled out.
“You said the only way you could convince this detective that Homer couldn’t possibly be the killer was to have a cadaver to demonstrate on, yes?”
I just nodded at my wife’s question.
“Can you tell me how you would do that? Convince him, I mean.”
“It’s … mechanics. Or kinetics. I’m not sure what label fits, but we know this for sure: Homer is much shorter than the man who was killed. And he’s frail as well. For the spike to have penetrated so deeply from a single blow, it would have to be delivered by a man pretty close to the same height as the victim. And to pull it up after the strike, by a very powerful man as well. But those are … obstacles that could be overcome, so I don’t think it would work.”
